Considering what horrors I thought this italicized opening promised

I am so lucky to be married to a man who loves to experiment 

I’m just glad it’s a guest post by BathMatt about gardening (the “first of several,” apparently!). I live off basement door-slot deliveries of ham, or something, and therefore don’t know shit about whether what he’s doing in the dirt is ridiculous or not. All I know is that 1) his wife still can’t wrap her mind around carrots not being gross just because they came out of dirt and 2) this topic is so serious it needs to be split into more than one part, like that “Full House” where Uncle Jesse parachutes into a tomato truck and almost misses his wedding.

Anyway, Bath Matt leads by complaining about how you can procrastinate all you want but if you want to start a garden you’ll still have “an afternoon” of work ahead of you. Gee. What a bummer. Here’s a teaspoon of cement.

But before I talk about Garden 2013, I’ll share a bit of info on how I built our raised beds.

Please, Bath Matt. Don’t keep us in suspense with the raised bed info!

Despite how it looks in these pics, our yard actually has a good bit of shade.

Oh, you’d be surprised at how many overexposed aspects of your life have a good bit of shade on them, hon.

So Bath Matt talks about how many hours of sun he has every day, how many planks and how many screws he used to put the compost-filled boards together, and how his “trellis thingy” is made out of from posts, clothesline, “the most interesting part — turnbuckles” …

… and how “laborious” it was working the boards into the massive 2.6-degree “hill” of their yard, and includes a picture of the neighbor’s cat sitting in what he probably thinks are the kitty litter equivalents of Dooce’s $35,000 Bathtub.

Welcome to Kerflandia, where picnic salads are fun and screws that adjust the tension on lines are interesting.

“This will pass for a hill when No Bull Burgers pass for cheezburgers.”

Bath Matt ends with a whine about how hard his “trellis thingy” is to move, leaving readers on the edge of their seats — in anticipation? dry heaving from boredom? — in breathless anticipation of a post slated for Friday, in which he talks about what’s planted there (spoiler: kale and shit Kathy won’t stop calling “braising greens” because she read it on a package at Trader Joe’s once and it makes her feel upper middle class or something).

Kathy’s weekly round-up of meals is like the dream you have about  featherdusting your Franklin Mint plates

Especially this one.

—if you forgot it any faster, your mind would be going back in time.

It’s like a rodeo of oats and babies, with the opening flag ceremony by a stay-at-home mom who would rather virtuously walk in the rain with a sick child than take her brand new SUV. There’s a sad photo of her child crying to illustrate everyone having colds for 26 minutes, she used the word “strawbs” and she ate a tiny portion of frosting in one of those cups they give you your dose in at the methadone clinic.

“If Mr. McMurphy doesn’t want to take his medication orally, I’m sure we can arrange that he can have it some other way.”

She ate eggs and toast and fruit, a smoothie that had already sat in her fridge a day, bread, fish tank-gravel-looking granola, nut butter, oats she soaked overnight until they were as listless and drippy as Kath’s sentences, nut butter, oats, toast, another serving of oats in another penultimately garbage container of “maple almond butter” —

She’s going to poke someone’s eye out with that thing!

— nut butter, pancakes with enough chia seeds on top it looks like someone tipped over a container of black pepper, and more toast.

Lunches:

• She ate at the fakery, where she was an integral part of intensive “testing” turning sandwiches into salads. Heavy stuff, taking the filling out of a sandwich and adding lettuce.

Subway makes its sandwich artists sign an iron-clad NDA promising never to give up the secrets of putting things in a bowl and adding jalapenos and red wine vinegar and shit.

This was the Tofu Pesto and it rocked! They all come with a big slice of bread-of-your choice. I chose Pesto Parmesan Swirl!

Did you! Why are you shouting!

Also, the bread looks like it needs to be dunked in gravy before it could get down a human’s throat.

• A wrap with leftover salmon, cheese, avocado and “greek yogurt”

that looks like a background item from a Zoloft ad.

• A lunch of a sliced orange, chips, tinily sliced carrots, cottage cheese with a blob of fig goo and an orange ceramic spoon, and “salad with avocado and power greens with Annie’s Woodstock” (The first is a dressing, but what’s a power green? Does it get good mileage?) cries out that its creator has too much time on her hands and no passion beyond “I was in a very orange mood this day!” to do anything much with it.

• She fried an egg and put that and a slice of “Apple Scrapple bread” and some hummus and avocado on a salad.

• “Massaged” kale (lordy), chips and sardine “salad.” A chunk of sardine salad is forging out on its own, away from this dull end. Godspeed, little salad chunk.

At one point, she also ate “banana soft serve” from Carpe Donut made by “a fancy technique extractor!” I don’t know what that is and I suspect Kathy doesn’t either, but I hope it looks like this:

Kathy’s dinners included:

• Her joyless version of beans and cheese on tortilla with guacamole and spinach and Greek yogurt on top, plus spinach salad stingily daubed with orange dressing for “quesadilla night.” But all I can think about is that moist bean sprout of a cheese-arm reaching for help out of Kathy’s tortilla in the upper left.

• Sweetened Gumby-legged sausage “we got from a local farmer friend,” kale from their yard, and whatever the fakery thinks is “Tuscan Sourdough” (probably buckwheat and flaxseed and one molecule of a rosemary frond) at a “homebrew tasting” with “friends” who must have brought some not-pictured fried chicken or something because no way did everyone just eat this.

That’s like what you eat when you’re putting away the food and just want to have a few more frivolous bites. Even it looks a little out of its league having to assume the role of “dinner.”

• A mysterious “special event” with a “friend” who works in public affairs who is obviously such a good friend she lets Kathy spell her name “Kristin” when it’s actually “Kristen.” Kathy and Actually-Kristen

oogled [sic] over the beautifully designed rooms and then feasted on flank steak, chicken satay with a peanut sauce, grilled asparagus, polenta with tomato sauce and chopped salad. Apple tart for dessert!

The escaping asparagus and lettuce appearing scattered after an earthquake are a commentary on man’s desire to “consume” while being ignorant of the actual “destruction” wrought by what he considers his “needs.” Mixed media, no onions, 2013. From the private collection of Daniel the Jam-Assigner.

Everyone got terrariums to take home, and I hope Kathy didn’t walk to this event, because the idea of her walking home carrying this:

makes me want to frown and shake my head.

Maybe Kristen will help Kathy with writing like she sees herself as a 9-year-old on a sugar-fueled field trip to the miniature golf palace, pointing and chomping and putting exclamation points on everything.

Kristen, have you met the bears yet? This might be a tough one.

• Whole-wheat pasta twice, since she’s obviously at risk of getting the kind of scurvy you get when you don’t have enough flour in your diet. The second time, it’s on what she calls “spaghetti night,” because Kathy thinks that word is the same as “pasta.” And that calling something “night” will make it special: Hot Pocket Night! Cold Leftover Cheeseburger Night! Thai Takeout and Too Much Of That Russian Pomegranate Vodka from Trader Joe’s Night! “Whole-wheat penne” is no more spaghetti than chips and millet are “rice” in “rice and beans.” This onionless meal also includes ciabatta Bath Matt “mixed up,” as though the bread were a salsa or a cocktail, or a wacky heart-warming comedy starring an early Lindsay Lohan.

Probably not this one.